Never Quite A Fairytale
by Lady Altair
Summary: Living a fairytale would be easy if happy endings were free. Regulus Black will play the hero anyway, just this once. DH spoilers.


Title: Never Quite A Fairytale

Disclaimer: Playing with someone else's toys. I'll put them back when I've finished.

Author's Note: I need to stop writing such depressing stuff. I know I promised happy, (and I've posted happy! check my profile, it's "Must Be Genetic"...and no one dies! Or is sad. At all!) but I can't escape it. I like to detail the torture JKR's already outlined on these poor characters.

So there we go. Read on.

* * *

It was Regulus's favorite tale in the whole book, but he never told his mother that. He knew better even as a child. Liking the story made him weak, like Sirius, but unlike Sirius, he was ashamed of this.

It was not a story in which Slytherin triumphed. It was tragic and romantic and _weak._

It was in the book of Founders' Tales his Aunt Druella had given him for his third birthday. His mother approved, for there were a number of stories within that painted Salazar Slytherin as the best kind of hero, finding glory and triumph along the way. Those were the sort of stories she would read to him.

The one about Slytherin's locket and Hufflepuff's daughter was not in Walburga's repertoire. She had flipped over it once, sniffing haughtily and decrying it as a tale for simple-minded, filthy-blooded fools. It tarnished the name of the great Salazar and she would not even deign to read it.

He is almost nineteen now, and Regulus Black sits on the floor of his room, The Founders' Tales open before him. He runs his hand over the page, smoothing it over the lifelike face printed on it. Regulus has always liked this picture best, on the last page before the story turns tragic and the illustrations grim. She is Hufflepuff's daughter and she is bright and golden, a happy smile on her face, a heavy silver locket around her neck, etched with an ornate, serpentine 'S'. His hand tightens around the replica in his hand, reading over the pages one last time…

…_but Slytherin's son could not be content. He had won the golden daughter of Hufflepuff, but troubles plagued the man. His wife was beloved and bright, and deserved more than a youngest son, without fortune or inheritance. She deserved splendor, jewels to match her great green eyes, a crown to rest on her gold-bright hair._

_He vowed to set forth on a grand adventure, to leave Hogwarts Castle for the greatness beyond and to return with the means to give his love everything he felt she deserved._

_Hufflepuff's daughter, who was good-hearted and content with little, beseeched him to remain. No riches could make her love him more, and she did not wish him to go, but his heart was set. He could not be content until his wife was fitted in all the finery due her. _

_Before he set out, Slytherin's son, ever fearful that other men may try to steal his lovely wife away in his absence, sought out his father's advice. Salazar Slytherin, the cunning and ever-resentful of those who remained in Hogwarts Castle, presented his son with an ornate silver locket, telling him "Give this to your wife. It will keep her from loving any but you." _

_And so his son returned to the castle his father had long ago abandoned and presented his golden wife with the locket, telling her "Wear this for me, my love, while I am gone away. I will return." And he kissed her goodbye and set forth for his fortune._

_The son's wife wore the locket ceaselessly, never removing it. Slowly, her bright beauty and life began to fade, for the locket was cursed. For every affectionate thought not of her husband, for every act of kindness for any other living soul but him, the locket stole from her life. This was Salazar Slytherin's idea of loyalty._

_Her husband, having met with success on his journey, returned as a rich man to find his bright and beloved wife faded and dying. Ever fearful and now recognizing the terrible truth of his wife's mortality, he again set out after the legend of the Deathly Hallows that he might save her. He kissed her goodbye once again as she lay in her bed, his hand brushing against the silver locket she still wore around her neck._

_Only months after he left, he received word. If he wished to see his wife once more, he must return quickly; her death was imminent. He had found no trace of the Hallows, but he abandoned his quest and flew to her side._

_She slept in their bed, still and quiet as though already dead, though her chest rose and fell. Her husband sat beside her, begging her forgiveness for ever leaving her, asking why she must leave him now. A voice answered him. _

"_She dies because she loves, son of Slytherin. She betrays you in her heart. She loves and we kill. That is the nature of our enchantment," a voice hissed. The serpent on locket was speaking._

_Angered and quick to distrust, he demanded of the voice, "Who does she love? Who does she betray me with?"_

"_Many," the voice replied. "She loves many. She loves her mother, her sisters. She loves the little children her mother brings to teach. She loves the children of Ravenclaw, of Gryffindor. She loves many."_

"_But who does she love as she loves me?" Slytherin's son demanded. "Who does she love as I love her?"_

_The voice was silent._

_Anguished, Slytherin's son ripped the locket from her neck, tossing it into the corner and falling to his knees beside her bed. He knelt throughout the night, begging his fair wife's pardon, for his faithlessness and mistrust._

_Hufflepuff's daughter died as the morning dawned._

Regulus stopped reading there, grinding his teeth and turning his head away from the page. The painted girl in the illustration is no longer the girl in his head. Magda is all he can see, long golden-blonde braids, yellow-and-black striped ties, freckles, and her lovely brown eyes. She is smiling up at him, they are in the library, on the Quidditch pitch, sprawled out on the grass by the lake and he loves her.

Regulus is not handsome like Sirius, not clever like Sirius, not bold and loud and brave like Sirius, but golden, beautiful Magda McKinnon loves _him. _

Or she did. Before he let her die. Before he let her die and Sirius did not protect her.

He is thirteen years old when her first notices her. She was Hufflepuff's Keeper, and she held out her hand to him at his first match as the two teams met up on the pitch. And she smiles and wishes him luck, and explains that she can do that because Seekers and Keepers don't really have anything to do with each other.

When he is fifteen, he punches James Potter for knocking Magda off her broom in a match. He is fairly sure it will impress her. Sirius thrashes him in the end, but watching Magda pull Sirius off and then deal him a black eye with her delicate-looking fist is entirely worth the injuries sustained. She kisses him that afternoon in the infirmary, immediately after informing him that he should never attempt to defend her again. Somehow, physical violence and her indifference to him endear Sirius to the Hufflepuff. It gives Regulus a very keen sense of victory. He purposely holds her hand and showers her with affection in the corridor whenever Gryffindors are about (because they're sure to carry the story, especially the pudgy blond that Sirius runs with).

When he is seventeen, he receives the Dark Lord's Mark. Magda does not see it until months later, after they've left school. He had some vague idea of hiding it from her until the purebloods triumph and his Master rules. She is pureblooded, and he cannot conceive that she would not understand. She catches a glimpse of it when Regulus forgets and rolls up his sleeves. She cries and cringes when he tries to hold her, to console her.

He is afraid she will run to the Ministry.

Even worse, she runs to Sirius. He follows her. She collapses onto her knees on the doorstep, sobbing. He knows she will tell Sirius everything, because she is afraid and Sirius will be very kind to her. She is afraid of him now, and Regulus is sick and ashamed.

He has never really hated his brother before, but he does now, as the smarter, better, handsomer man pulls the one thing Regulus could ever label 'just mine' into his flat.

He doesn't see her anymore. Severus Snape, oddly sympathetic, tells him it's better that way; her mother's a Phoenix, her family is marked. Regulus hates the whore anyway; she's started living with Sirius and he tells the older boy that he couldn't care less if her family's house burned to the ground with all of them in it.

On Christmas Eve, he discovers how terrible a lie that is.

Regulus bites his tongue until it bleeds and hates himself when he arrives late to the address he was given and finds all eleven McKinnons dead, his fellows ripping through the house for anything useful. Her parents and brothers are in the entrance hall. Magda lies dead in the corner of the kitchen, her wand still in her hand, her younger siblings collapsed on top of each other around her, arms entwined, hands clasped, faces pressed together. The youngest is not even a year old, clutched in one arm by a young teenager who looks hauntingly like her older sister. They are all unmarked. Fairy lights and evergreen decorate the house, and brightly wrapped presents are piled under the tree, never to be opened.

He hates the sight of her cooling body on the grey tiled floor, felled by his friends while she protected her little brothers and sisters. He hates himself, for letting her see that mark on his forearm and letting her run away from the protection he could've given her. He hates that he ever had the hideous thing burned there, that he ever joined anything that could leave eleven people dead in their home on Christmas Eve—death was easier to see, to ignore, when it was nameless bodies in unfamiliar houses. He never felt shame or regret for any of what he has done, because he selfish and those deaths meant nothing to him. Magda means something. Those little girls and boys around her mean something to him. Her parents and elder brothers in the hall mean something to him. He knows them by name and they are cold on the floor.

He hates Sirius even more then he did before, because Magda is _here_, dead and cold in her parents' kitchen instead of warm and alive in his brother's flat.

He thinks about this for just a little while. She would still have lost her family, but she would have Sirius, and he would be gallant for her, a white knight made all the brighter when compared to Regulus. Maybe he would've married her, made another family with her. He never imagined that the thought of Magda in Sirius' arms would be preferable to anything at all, but Regulus would've cheerfully attended the wedding if it meant erasing this night, this mockingly cheerful house, where fairy lights cast unnatural colors over so many glassy, unseeing eyes.

It isn't quite the fairy tale. Magda isn't quite the virtuous, immaculate wife (because Regulus cannot ever forgive that Sirius was the one standing next to her grave being consoled and not him) and he is not the well-intentioned husband out to conquer the world for his love (because the only person he thought about when that mark was burned into his arm was himself). But he likes to think it is, because children's stories are neat, simple and noble and he wants to feel like this one honorable act will atone for the terrible things he has done.

He supposes he'll try being a hero for once. He has the information, the ability, dropped by an arrogant not-quite-man to a humble house elf. Magda would have liked it. He's done so little, he feels he owes her this grand, heroic gesture. It is the one token of his love he has to offer her now.

Regulus likes to think that she'll be waiting for him, but then he remembers all those glassy eyes and is sure that he deserves no such welcome. He knows she is nowhere near where he is going, where he rightly deserves to go.

He stares at the false locket in his hand, and then returns his focus back to the book on the floor. He flips back a few pages to the picture of Hufflepuff's daughter. He knows the rest of the story by heart now—he is about to act out his own twisted rendition, he doesn't need to read it.

Slytherin's son sacrificed his life to break the powerful enchantment on the locket, that no one might suffer more from love than is natural and human. His father's power was greatly diminished by his son's sacrifice, for he had put forth a great deal of power and rage into the enchantment meant to bring suffering down on his former friends and their children, and soon after died.

Kreacher is puttering in the halls outside, still anxiously waiting. Not much longer now. This book is the first and the last of his goodbyes. He's asked Kreacher to burn it when he gets back.

He leaves the book open on the floor when he goes. He goes for atonement, for the hope that the inhuman wretch who styles himself a lord among men might one day feel his mortality and cower before it. He goes for Magda McKinnon, and for her innocent family, for all those times he watched passively as life was wiped from so many nameless faces.

He does not go for himself. This is not quite a fairy tale, and he holds no hope of happily ever after.


End file.
